Taxpayer’s Money? Not So Much.

There’s a couple of things wrong with this letter to the Tri-City News suggesting that the money used for the airport extension to the Canada Line should have been used to fund the Evergreen Line. Obviously, I have a problem with the idea that the best source of funding for rail transit in the Lower Mainland is taking funding away from other rail transit in the Lower Mainland. I don’t really see how that moves us forward.

But I think there’s something wrong as a matter of fact here. YVR kicked 300 million into the Canada Line project to pay for that extension. Whatever it was, it wasn’t, as the letter’s author claims, “an irresponsible, if not reckless, use of taxpayers’ money.”

I don’t blame the guy who wrote the letter. Not everyone needs to be up on all the gory details of how public projects are funded. But the paper’s editors screwed up. They owe their readers a correction.